Angels in Dark Places
by idylweiss
Summary: the first time they see each other is when she throws an egg at his face. the headlines the next day call her a potentially dangerous menace and analyse her life from birth to present. and she buys the paper and tacks it on her wall as a badge of honour. part one of ten. [modern au]


_she dwells with beauty—beauty that must die;_

* * *

The first time they see each other is when she throws an egg at his face. Her aim is not perfect and he is moving quickly through the crowd, but Eponine is satisfied when his golden hair is covered with similarly golden yolk that is dripping onto his golden self and the night is lit with quick flashes of golden light as photographers capture the look of perfect disbelief on his face (eyes wide, primrose mouth slightly ajar, hands half-raised in some kind of paltry defense). She doesn't even mind when she feels the black-gloved grip of security personnel around her wrists, squeezing her so tightly she can almost hear her bones grinding into dust against each other. and on her face there is a grin of victory.

Eponine doesn't even mind that she's jailed for the night, and stares with pleasant placidity up at the flourescent lights around which a menagerie of insects circle while outside Montparnasse is trying to scrape up the money to pay for her way out. She's done it, and she's pleased, and jail is quite nice, after all, compared to the acid heat of her apartment. (It is summer, and it is hot in Paris, France, and she doesn't have the money to afford much in the way of cooling, unless propping open the windows with a stick and praying for a soft breeze to bathe her in a sea of relief while she folds her ratty old tank top up to below an even rattier old bra so that the windowsill digs physical reminders of her existence into her skin counts as central air conditioning.)

When Montparnasse comes for her in the morning she gives a laugh in response to his curiosity and presses a swollen kiss to his mouth while her hands creep to the back pocket of his jeans and filch a Marlboro. Later they will smoke it together, her lipstick staining his mouth and smearing across her face as they exchange mouthfuls of smoke, her exhale becoming his inhale becoming his exhale becoming her inhale as she ponders how much she didn't love this boy, who always strove towards gentility. (Eponine has little use for gentility.)

"Why'd you do it?" he asks, one hand fiddling with the strap of her shirt while the other tangles in the dark of her hair.

"Hmm?" she turns towards him, boredom sitting restless in her eyes. She is more interested in the interplay of the light upon her skin as she holds a brown arm up to the day, shifting it this way and that, watching how the hair on her arm turns to molten gold as if the sun had set her on fire. And she thinks how it looks like yolk, and that tugs at the corners of her mouth. (Bastard had it coming.)

"Why'd you chuck an egg at him?" His breath tastes like ashes and she leans in for a lungful of self-destruction.

"I felt like it," she says lightly, looping too-skinny arms around his too-skinny neck. They are both so breakable, the two of them. It's a wonder they haven't yet managed to smash each other to smithereens.

"You felt like throwing an egg at Paris' new political darling?"

"Mmm."

"I would have thought you would like him," Montparnasse says. (His fingers edge under her top, and she lets them stay there, for now, because she likes the feel of his callouses and how gentle his rough hands can be.) "He's all socially aware and young-old idealistic. And bourgeois. You have a weakness for bourgeois boys."

"You thought wrong, then," she informs him, and that is the whole problem right there, isn't it? 'Parnasse thought a lot of things about 'Ponine, but the things 'Parnasse thought were often wrong, and 'Ponine did not often care enough to correct him. "Trust me. I know his type, touring the slums like he can _save_ us. Saint-Michel needs more than some pretty rich white boy weaned on his papa's money. And he can take his interference and the idea that he knows what's best for us and he can shove it where the sun don't shine."

"You think he's pretty?" Montparnasse asks, and there is hurt in his eyes.

"He's decent enough," says Eponine as she pretends not to see.

The headlines the next day call her a potentially dangerous menace and analyse her life from birth to present (but what they don't realise is that Eponine Jondrette had been fabricated at the age of eleven and never had a childhood) and she buys the paper and tacks it on her wall as a badge of honour.


End file.
